Psalm 109 is a “Cry For Vengeance.” Verse 8 reads: “Let his days be few; and let another take his office”; it goes on to ask God to kill the supplicant’s enemy and make beggars of his children. So some sneaky Christians thought it would be funny to sell T-shirts bearing the slogan at CafePress, because Godless liberals wouldn’t know that it was really a prayer for God to kill Barack Obama for being Muslim.
That Psalm is one of the “literary” passages in the Bible: it has to do with how people feel. It’s not a recommendation for how they ought to behave, any more than the parts of the Old Testament that mention murder, adultery, drunkenness, polygamy or the sequestering of women during menses are prescriptions for negotiating the world.
And that passage should not be used as code for hoping for the death of public figures. It is not clever. Not cute.
On the other hand, Gawker has no way of knowing whether those who were selling the T-shirt were alluding to Obama being a Muslim, particularly since he doesn’t appear to be any such thing. The designers might simply have been alluding to the President’s apparent drive to turn a two-year recession into a ten-year depression, a la FDR, and might have felt justified because of the suffering and suicides that go along large-scale depressions.
It still isn’t okay. It wasn’t okay for R.L. Hymers to pray for the death of a Supreme Court Justice, and it isn’t okay for anyone to pray for the death of a President of the United States. It is not clever; it’s evil. Big difference.
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